Re: [gedit-list] Gedit for console

[Doug McNutt <douglist macnauchtan com>]

At 23:33 +0100 6/28/14, James Freer wrote:
> OS is Xubuntu.
>
> Just out of interest... I am not a programmer.
>
> I love gedit as a prose text editor for a writer in the gui. However, I also use the console a lot and was 
> wondering how much altering of code would be involved to make gedit a console editor as well. It's the 
> wordwrap (softwrap), auto indent and similar features which are so useful. Nano, and other console editors 
> don't do softwrap.
>
> Emacs can be used in either but I find it 'heavy going' - it would be so nice to have all the features of 
> gedit but for the console. I use some apps where I have to use Pico - as a gui editor makes things awkward. 
> I can use gedit from the command line but that's not what I mean. There's no editor I know of that can do 
> wordwrap in the console apart from 'heavyweight' Emacs and Vim.
>
> Just an idea and I am sure many folk would also like a console version. One other thing that would be nice 
> would be 'mid cursor positioning' which only Emacs and Pico do (to the best of my knowledge).
>
> Thanks
> james

I agree wholeheartedly. What you describe is what everyone ought to be using.

The absolute best example of what you're talking about is Apple's Macintosh Programming Workshop, MPW, which 
was introduced when the Mac 2 was a really good machine. Think pre-1990.

Needless to say, MPW was abandoned when Apple converted to its BSD UNIX underlayment for OS neXt  for which 
the X stood for decimal 10 and was not to be confused with with the company NEXT which provided most of the 
UNIX-underneath parts of OS-X as Steve returned to AAPL.  Sooooo MPW works only on Apple's OS 9 and lower. 
Use X-code and objective C (no C++).

MPW starts with a text file, ASCII text, that is.  You can use it as a simple text editor if you like but MPW 
files can also be MPW commands which are just like commands in the UNIX C-shell.  If you compose a line in a 
text document that contains a path to another text file that file is executed as a command with an ability to 
process arguments that follow the request on the line being executed.

The important thing is the ENTER key which is different from the RETURN key.  ENTER is part of the keyboard 
on the numeric section of the keyboard and RETURN is at the left side of the alphabetic part of the keyboard. 
 Those keys seem to be permanently connected to each other in ubuntu.  I have this feeling that I don't know 
something I need to know to fix  that.

The point is that ENTER is a request telling MPW to execute the selected text which might be just a line in 
which the insertion point is displayed or an entire selection of multiple lines.

It was also possible to designate a file, by name, to be a target file.  Commands, a bit like SED, to edit 
the target could be executed from another worksheet.  You could edit the contents of the target with commands 
( gedit ought to have some), that would allow for finding text in the target and replacing or adding changes. 
Just an ability to set the insertion point on an open file with a command would be nice in gedit.

Unfortunately MPW is no longer supported. I use it for everything I do on this Apple 8500 running OS 9.  
Nonsense! I just never use Apple's Finder.  The machine starts up running an MPW worksheet file. Everything 
else is done with commands that run the likes of Excel 5 under its control.

MPW, as offered, was essentially a C-shell.  The command names are spelled differently and are easier to 
remember than the 2 character keyboard-easy names but in most cases you're executing from a selected line of 
text that was created long ago.  Two key commands are not nearly as important. The fancy capabilities of a 
bash shell are just not necessary because a couple of lines in an MPW document can be executed together to do 
whatever you want.

<ftp://macnauchtan.com/Software/gedit/target> shows some work I did to support the target mode of MPW under 
gedit rules for tools.  I hoped it would be taken seriously but it's a PITA to keep it up to date as gedit 
keeps changing.  Have a look.

A serious problem in gedit is that the real effort is not the gedit part, it's in SourceView which 
essentially belongs to gedit now. Serious changes there are required and they could well be a disaster in the 
minds of those who use SourceView directly - - Are there people like that?

Sooooo.

Why not make gedit into a shell?  And while you're at it make it possible to declare gedit as the shell you 
want opened when you log in or request a terminal.

-- 
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry.